


silent burning

by ruruka



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: M/M, Post canon, basically an origin story of how i see end game rivalshipping, very long. sorry.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-17
Updated: 2020-03-17
Packaged: 2021-02-28 16:27:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23190159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ruruka/pseuds/ruruka
Summary: yuugi makes a fine worker.set as the aftermath of dm canon.
Relationships: Kaiba Seto/Mutou Yuugi
Comments: 11
Kudos: 125





	silent burning

In Kaiba’s mind, their interaction went like this:

_“You couldn’t possibly ever surpass me, so I’ll pity you enough to offer you a space at my corporation.”_

_“Oh, Kaiba-sama...th-thank you, it would be an honor to even be allowed to step foot inside your office building..!”_

Though...on occasion, he’ll recall it the way an outsider might, unbiased toward the way Mutou Yuugi had looked up at him there behind the dusted front counter of Kame Game, the way he’d almost paled when the entry bell chimed yet held his ground to face Kaiba Seto one on one, player versus player.

He’d set across the city with one single task, yet sniffed and straightened in a moment of hesitation, because when he’d rehearsed the exchange, just vaguely, Mokuba had decided stomping in and demanding _work for me_ wouldn’t set a partnership off on the right extremity.

“Mutou,” he placed face down to start, a pleasantry that lifted Yuugi’s expression into confusion, but the sort of kind that’s funny, bemused to have known himself as a venomously spat _Yuugi_ for the past three years, and now suddenly he’s a respected member of the ever advancing society. Peculiar. Amusing.

“Hi, Kaiba,” he greeted then, tipping his head lopsided to offer a sweet, somewhere suspicious smile. “How’ve you been? What brings you around today?”

Their stares met, a dying flame to the thickest sheet of plaster. And Kaiba, there, though he would not say, felt of a presenter at the front of the class, shaking hands that fumbled for notecards all in misplaced order. And Yuugi, there- he flinched, only once the force of two broad hands had slammed the counter and Kaiba Seto, CEO of the nation’s largest corporation and something of a begrudging acquaintance since high school, spoke in his natural loud, overbearing jolt. “Work for me.”

Yuugi bunched himself up, shoulders pinched and hand lifted, uncertain, beside him. “Um...ahaha...what?”

Smoke faded in a drawing of himself backward, brushed the lint from a sleeve to fold both arms and deny Yuugi’s eye again. “...It’s come to my attention that you’re something of an icon in the Duel Monsters industry.” When they’d practiced it the night before, Mokuba had said something like, _tell him his fame is amazing, tell him everybody loves him!_ “I’d like to offer you...a place. On the KaibaCorp public relations team.”

A deeper sense of unknowing etched onto his face.

“You...want me to work at KaibaCorp..?” He pulled a hand down his mouth, tapped a finger overtop the lip. “I...I can’t just _leave_ my family to run the shop by themselves, my grandfather is getting older, I don’t know what they’d do without me…”

“Does your grandfather pay you ten million yen per year.”

Kaiba remembers he hadn’t asked it, because using his breath on inflection in such a stupid statement would make him wasteful.

Yuugi balked back, though the money hadn’t sent him as drooling and groveling as Kaiba planned it might. He should know Yuugi better than to be materialistic. But he doesn’t quite know how to interact with people who buy their shoes at department stores.

“That’s...a lot,” Yuugi noted, _dumbly,_ still tapping that thoughtful finger until it dropped right to the counter alongside his gaze. “This is all really sudden, I mean…”

“Take some time to consider my offer,” Kaiba threw into the empty space. The shelves around could suffocate him packed with their vintage dusty memorabilia. “Your pay and benefits will be effective immediately upon starting, you’ll have security under my word that you’ll keep your position so long as you don’t screw up.”

Mokuba had said something closer to _you’ll always have a place here._ Kaiba likes to translate into his own dialect. 

Oath given, he turned at one hip to stride from the aisle wide room. 

But he stopped.

“Public relations, huh…” said Yuugi’s chewed lips. “Could I manage the social media?”

Kaiba moved to face him again, the low light casting shadows to massage down broad back muscles. His boots were pointed and heeled and polished, hair cut every first Thursday of the month, and somehow it’s the five feet of gothic vomit in the white short sleeved button up behind the counter that children stop on the street for autographs. Both then and now, his mouth sneers petty. “You’d be a spokesperson, something to attract attention. When the next generation of Duel Disks are released, I want it strapped to _your_ arm in the magazine advertisements.”

“Like a model?” Yuugi’s teeth, bottom ones minutely crooked since childhood, bore into a cringe. “Jeez, ah, I’m not much of a public speaker, to be honest with you…”

If he’s got enough patience left to recall the Grand Prix, yes, he’s well aware. “Anything can be taught. You need those skills for addressing your... _fans,_ regardless of the work.”

Yuugi blinked up at him, in wonder, in something close to abrupt delight, creaking out a disaster of a grin.

His first day is a Monday, after arrangements have been made with his grandfather to take shifts every other day (and after, he’d paraphrased, he’d convinced him that he wasn’t _siding with the enemy_ by taking a position under Kaiba Seto, destroyer of dragons). His first day is a Monday, where Kaiba can tell he hadn’t known what to wear, but at least the jeans are dark and the vest _almost_ matches. He shows Yuugi every landmark he needs to be aware of, the executive bathrooms and the floor set for beta testing. For a short while he watches his employees meander around among holograms, VR headsets leading them in arches around the room, though more so he’s taken to gazing at Yuugi’s amazement pressed up against the glass. Nothing of the glister in his eyes or softly rounded mouth reads unimpressed. And he revels in that. Impressing Yuugi is step one. Opponents are twice as easy to overwhelm when they take too long to admire the craft that does it.

The thirty first floor is where he drops him off for the morning. At every sleek, chrome cubicle, workers stumble over themselves to welcome him, so many tight bows forward and shouts of his name that Kaiba can just about feel the heat smoldering off his face.

Off in one corner, a man stands stiffly up, bows forward, glasses slipping all the way down his nose when he straightens again. “Mutou Yuugi, it is our pleasure to welcome you to Kaiba Corporation-!”

“Please, please, come right in!”

“Have my desk!”

“Have mine!”

“Mutou Yuugi-!”

“ _Yuugi_ -kun!”

“Yuugi!”

“Mutou Yuugi!”

Among the noise of standing, bowing, shouting workers, Yuugi stutters his wide gaze to find Kaiba turned to him, lids low and brows high.

“Perhaps I should have warned you,” he mumbles. “Extensive Duel Monsters knowledge and interest is a prerequisite to employment at my company.”

The third or fourth day Mutou Yuugi works for him, he bothers to check in on floor thirty one in a midday jaunt down. Once, the elevator rings, and he steps out in a calm sweep, surveys the room for the closest scent of life. It hardly takes long to become the moth gliding over to Mutou Yuugi’s light, already surrounded by a clump of others huddled around him. Kaiba stands behind the circle of nodding and awe, arms folded, interest patient. 

“Like this,” Yuugi’s voice clicks out. He’s seated in the middle at a long silver table, paper beneath the tip of his pen. Today he’s wearing purple. Kaiba wonders if his socks match.

“Amazing, Mutou-sama,” one spectator praises, fingers pressing fogged lenses back into place. A woman beside him, pencil skirted and bob-cutted as any office dame, is the first to clap her palms together, and the group of ten or so others follows suit. Among the applause, Yuugi runs his fingers modestly through his hair, gives an awkward laugh as his head lifts higher. “It’s nothing, I promise. I just- Oh. Kaiba.”

As the God he is, they all straighten out to turn toward him, several muted bows and eager _good mornings_ thrown out. He offers no more than a noise from his throat in acknowledgement of them, more appreciative that they’ve moved out of the way enough for him to step forward and leer over Yuugi’s shoulder. 

Like instinct he sees his hand shift to cover it, but his head shakes and he, in a tentative motion, lifts the page up in both hands to gesture as he captions it aloud. “We’ve been brainstorming for a new Duel Links event. Implementing a tag duel feature changes up the game a little bit, and would give people more of a chance to connect with other players.”

“Amazing, amazing!” one tiny woman squeaks. 

Kaiba’s eyes shift briefly to her, falling forward again in a scrutinizing squint. “You’re Public Relations, not Tech Development.”

“Ah, I know…” Yuugi says. The paper lays back flat, picking up his pen to tap it against the edge of the messy sketches. “Sorry, I guess I was trying to think of a way to... _publicly relate_ on more of an...individual level. PVP, or really, player _with_ player.”

Yuugi explains himself clearly, concisely, without argument. Three years prior, he’d’ve torn the papers in half and apologized for going against expectations. Yuugi would’ve kept his head down when Kaiba spoke to him so stern. Now he makes eye contact. Now he laughs it off. 

Though he knows exactly what’s happened to him, Kaiba has to wonder when such a growth had occurred without his noticing. 

By the eleventh day of employment, Yuugi’s done well enough to earn another visit. This time, he’s standing with his back to the room, a pencil tucking strands of blond behind the ear it’s placed at, another pen hooked on the pocket of his white short sleeve button up. Today, he’s clipped on a tie.

The long table toward the back of the floor houses several stacks of papers, some crinkled, some perfect, various amounts of scrap plastic, enough untouched mugs to tell Kaiba both that Yuugi hasn’t stepped away from his place in likely days, and that his coworkers don’t know him well enough to know he hates coffee.

His approach does not garner a movement. Yuugi, in his delicate hands, toys with the figure, vast printer stood ahead of him stinking of ink and PLA. Kaiba stares at him for what his watch counts as forty two seconds before Yuugi blinks, glancing swiftly up from the task in his hands to greet him, brows lifted. 

“Hey,” he smiles, though it’s quick to fade with a look spared back down. “Um- I’ve been, uh, working on these for a few days. I was thinking I could use them as prototype pieces for this, um...game I’ve been thinking of.”

Kaiba stares first at the shape of Yuugi’s face with his bangs pulled back that way, one ear lined in silver studs all up it, the faintest chisel to his cheekbones at their height. He next looks to the piece offered toward him, accepting it in a delicate hand and eyeing it out as a 3D printing of Ultimate in all her glory.

“I made this one, too, see?” Yuugi laughs, displaying in his fingertips a tiny model Gandora. It retracts back toward his chest where he fidgets with the position of its wings for a moment, sets it on the table to rest there afterward. “I think this would make a good size for the pieces… You can keep that one, if you want.”

“It seems you’re using my equipment for your own personal enjoyment more than working,” Kaiba comments, though he cannot deny the two inch Blue Eyes Ultimate Dragon makes a nice decor piece for his desk upstairs. 

Neither can he deny the way, after Yuugi’s worked at KaibaCorp for twenty days, that he sneers, awed at his gall to say, “Y’know, Gandora could actually beat Ultimate, if the situation were really perfect.”

Today Yuugi’s wearing jeans again, but they pass for slacks and his button up has sleeves, tie a dark garnet color to accent the black of his shirt, so Kaiba deems the look...alright. Seated behind the hard oak of his desk, he picks through a bento with suspicion at every last grain of rice. He’ll have to slap his receptionist upside her stupid, Yuugi-oshi head for letting him up to the top floor with her key card on account of having brought _lunch._ His office doors tapped open. Yuugi held up two boxes of rice and chicken and raw spinach.

His mother had made them, he said, especially for the two of them, the driving factor in why Kaiba allows it in his sight at all. It’d been a battle to keep Jounouchi from eating his all morning. That opens the lid. 

“If you stall long enough,” Kaiba fires back to the gunfight Yuugi had begun upon spotting the little Ultimate among his sparse desk trinkets, seated closest to it on the opposite side of Kaiba in a chair he’d pulled up without asking until he’d already sat down. _“This is okay?”_ Yuugi said, tense at the ready to leave were it not. Kaiba only stared, whittling down the bamboo shoot of his memory. Yuugi three years ago would never have had the audacity to come into his office. Now, sunned in the light of the windows behind him, Kaiba pinches the finest smirk of one mouth corner. “Is that your new strategy to beat me?”

“It would have to be a defensive opponent,” Yuugi says, grinding the thought up into dust. “Let’s say, somebody else had Blue Eyes Ultimate Dragon on the field-”

“Impossible,” Kaiba scoffs. He roots through the spinach in search of the bell pepper slices beneath it. When he glances up, a brief moment when the other’s eyes are busy at his lap, Yuugi has no pepper in his box, a cooked slice of mushroom instead. Kaiba sniffs. “Mokuba. If he behaves.”

“Still,” Yuugi laughs, “his strategies are exactly the same as yours. Destroy.” 

Leaning his shoulders back, Kaiba crosses one leg under his desk and watches him thoughtfully, mouth lengthened. 

Chicken poised in his chopstick ends, Yuugi pauses motion to go on, “The field would just have to be full, but it would work. That’s ten cards on their side...nine in mine-”

“Minus what would have been needed to sacrifice for Gandora.”

“Right,” he nods, then raises a finger in the air. “Or, you could Special Summon something afterward.”

“Your Spell Zones are full.”

“I could play Resurrection of the Dead, and then lay another card in its place.” Thought rushes behind his eyes. Kaiba can practically bite right into it. “Or use a Magician Girl’s effect. Or Sage’s Jewel.”

At that, his brow lifts. “You’d call the Black Magician only to use as fodder. _You.”_

“All hypothetical,” he smiles tightly, hands waving out. They relax again, wrist heavy to lift his utensil. “But with all that, plus Field Spells, that’s…”

“6300 Attack Points,” Kaiba calculates quickly enough for Yuugi to smirk across the desk at him. “Did you just do three hundred times twenty one in your head?”

That smirk, that _look,_ the narrow of his eyes- it all coats Kaiba’s throat in heat, and all at once tells him Yuugi’s _used_ to him, to his mind and its workings and every last stratagem. He lifts a napkin corner to his mouth in slow wipes.

“It wouldn’t work in Speed Duel,” is all he has left to offer.

Yuugi laughs with his mouth open this time. “You _invented_ Speed Duel, of course it doesn’t.”

In that patch of sun, bringing his black shirt to a burn, Kaiba cannot help the pride in his gaze.

When at last Yuugi has worked there for a month, a month he’s taken to in impressive stride, times even where Kaiba’s come in and been already met by his wave of hello- by the time Yuugi’s worked there a month, the third generation of Duel Disks has had its workings tweaked enough for international sales, a prototype from his closest tech team presented to him early one morning. All the men there stink of sleepless sweat and the pressure of performance. They’d better, he thinks. He’d gotten them to leave Sony for this.

It works as well as any other Disk Kaiba has created before it, updates added and a switch to cancel the holograms should he find any legal trouble for offending a faint hearted American. With a nod to them, they all look to just about collapse on themselves, and he hears their clapped high fives and groans of relief his whole way out the door. In the elevator, he pulls the emblem on his collar close enough to murmur into it, “Bring me Yuugi.”

“Oh, wow,” is the first thing he says, once his request is met and they’re stationed on a level closer to the basement. Another floor only accessible through executive key card. Stance wide, he’d waited for Yuugi at the elevator entry to it, cajoling him down with him into its expanse of chrome and quiet computer screens with a shove of the box into unsteady hands. Yuugi fumbled to hold onto it, blinking a double dozen times down to the picture printed on the box. “Oh, wow.”

“The photographer should be here any minute,” he says, adding lowly, “If he isn’t, I’ll call another one.”

Kept there in the steel of the square hall, Yuugi goes pale behind his expression of panic only long enough for Kaiba to catch, and then he’s breathing again, slow inhales as he lays the box to the closest table to them, bending forward to examine his face in its faint metal reflection.

Isono escorts a newcomer inside through the elevator, vanishing back once he’s gifted a short approving nod. Equipment weighs the man down by the back. He’s clumsy and dark, summers in Hokuto dark, fixing the stand of his tripod down ahead of him and throwing forward a deep bow. “Kaiba-sama,” he bids, rising again close enough to the tripod to knock it with an elbow, reaching out for it in rapid grapples and chest hammering. “Mutou-sama,” he sighs once he’s able to relax. “Thank you very much for your business. Shall we begin?”

A slate gray wall serves as the backdrop from there on. It isn’t perfectly lit here, but the fluorescents overhead are bright enough to let the camera focus where it needs to, and it isn’t the final shot, anyhow. Only practice. He’d like, standing beside the photographer with arms crossed and focus intent, to see what Yuugi’s capable of. And like hell would he let the whole world see his Duel Disk modeled on the arm of someone wearing red skinny jeans.

Despite it all, Yuugi follows instructions as well as he always has, posing with uncertainty each time how the photographer tells him to. He flinches when an abrupt _THERE!_ is shouted at his shifting arm, and Kaiba watches the awkward little smile wobble onto his face as the flash clicks overtop it.

“There’s water in the fridge,” Kaiba tells him with a point to the appliance in the corner, thinking to relieve the flush built up on his skin after twenty or so different shots. In a nod, grateful, he turns for it, Kaiba’s eyes upon him the entire time until the photographer pipes up beside him.

“He isn’t the most _natural_ model I’ve worked with,” he says, leant forward with one eye to adjust the camera focus. “But he’s got quite a face. Those cheekbones are maliciously beautiful!”

Arms still folded, Kaiba flicks a glance up to where Yuugi stands with a water bottle to his lips, head tipped lightly, chest breathing even. Attention pools back to the photographer only for Kaiba to order him closer, pouring a suggestion into his ear that widens the man’s dull brown eyes.

“Alright, Mutou-sama,” he commands once he’s returned to the set. The long table hosts an emptied Disk box and a half drunk water bottle, plastic crunched at the top. Kaiba eyes a drip of condensation all the way down its length. “Let’s try something... _sexy._ I want _sexy!_ Lose a few of those buttons.”

The way it’d gone in his head, Yuugi would stammer and burn a bright scarlet, pull his arms across himself like a defiant sarcophagus and stumble far away from the limelight. And for a moment the fantasy is accurate, though only to the point of Yuugi and his hot blushing face halting there, expression vast, dithering, and within the minute he’s the good boy everyone’ll dream of, stepping back to lift both hands and fumble with his collar. The red tie, the same from the weeks ago he’d first worn it, loosens, makes way for fingers to relieve the top two buttons of his black shirt, perhaps the same from that first outfit, too. He lowers his arm to aim the Disk toward the camera, but the puppetmaster behind it only scoffs.

“You can do better than that!” Kaiba remembers the photographer urging, remembers looking between him and his model darkened red up the front and wondering the definition of his exact humiliation. 

“I’m, uh, not really comfortable showing a lot of my chest-”

“Nonsense, you’re beautiful, you’re- you’re _exquisite_ , you’re-”

“That will be all,” Kaiba says, garnering a surprised glance from the man beside him. His leer only darkens. “I said that will be all. Leave.”

Bowing and muttering, the photographer complies, begins gathering up all his equipment as Yuugi walks forward, fingers guiding his buttons back where they belong and tie tightened again. Silently, eyes low, Kaiba reaches forward, and straightens it.

Yuugi, in his days holding the position that no longer can be counted, is an apple tree.

Not in the sense where- and trust him, yeah, he’s thought about it, trust him -not in the cliche _look how he’s blossomed!_ type way, grown from a sprout to full breathtaking foliage, rather Yuugi is an apple tree because in an orchard, Kaiba would still recognize just exactly the tree he’s looking for, the one with the fujis that just about _drip_ on the first bite, perfectly ripe, never left branches bare. There will always be an apple there for him, and even when rightfully it should taste bitter and sundried, the apple’s always as palatable as all the rest. 

Yuugi is an apple tree because he smells sweet and green, and Kaiba might like to see what kind of shade he can offer against the sear of summer light.

The first day the international model of Duel Disk 3.0 was born, he still recalls it, recalls the way Yuugi had been hush and slow to talk to him the rest of the afternoon, not _callously_ so but rather having his tongue clamped by feelings of shame, if the lingering heat beneath his eyes could serve any indication. Kaiba, for the most of that afternoon, too, chooses silence, keeps his focus on his work to ignore the knot settled just below his diaphragm. Every swallow, cough, pour of water down his throat does null to heal the sick way he feels, and he’d decide he were dying were it perhaps three years ago, but Kaiba present day thinks he’s a better doctor, good enough to know his denouement will not come without curing it himself. Even if Yuugi doesn’t realize it, the dinner invitation serves as just that.

He considers sending every witness away before the door can open. But it’s useless. It’s useless, but he still instructs the maids and drivers stay in their guest house property, keeps the main estate low lit and calm as he stands in the dining room arranging where the plates go over and over and over again. Across from each other implies too much, but beside each other is gauche and impractical for conversation. 

“You never cook for _me,”_ doesn’t make him quite jump, though he’s yet to expect the way Mokuba has snuck up behind him to lay eyes all over the dining table array. “Is that salmon? You made a fancy sauce and everything. Wow. I kinda wish you had a crush on _me_ now.”

“Mokuba.”

“Yeah, no, I’d rather be dead,” he laughs, morbidly so, and says, “But Yuugi sure is lucky. Mmm. Are you gonna ask him to marry you yet?”

Palms flat together, Kaiba places them before his mouth, _breathing_ in and out. Mokuba accepts the cue to duck and turn before he’s left without eardrums. “I’ll see you later, I’ll be home before nine,” he calls on his way for the door, snickering again as the space between them grows enough to conceal it.

He’d like to take the while alone to ready himself back from the slap of vexation, though he only has the time to blow the center candle out and carry it off into the kitchen, returned to the dining room with a stiff fall of his shoulders back.

“Ah,” Yuugi starts, biting the airy enjoyment on his lip. “Mokuba let me in.”

Kaiba can only nod back, though not before he’s had his fill of looking him up and down, from the laces on his boots to the array of glinting silver chokers, chains hanging down from them onto the graphic print of his t shirt. He looks tired, almost, or perhaps it's the flicks of eyeliner smudging themselves, perhaps the way his hoodie fits him two sizes too large, sleeves pushed to the elbows and zipper at half mast. Casual. Casual, extremely casual, and that’s how Kaiba feels, too, done down to a black turtleneck and pressed slacks, belt high and glinting. They’re both...dressed. Yes, they’re dressed.

There isn’t much left for him to do there but pull his own seat out, be thankful he’d last settled on plates arranged diagonally, his own at the head of the table and the other to his left. The chandelier lights replace the candle discarded, painfully dull to Kaiba yet reflecting in Yuugi’s amazed eyes as if he were watching an aircraft start up or a dragon be hatched, something awe inspiring that way.

“Is it fine?” he asks in a half murmur somewhere through dinner, watching the meat disappear from the other plate before the vegetables are even touched.

Yuugi hooks a little smile, reaching to lift to it the one glass of Marsanne he’d been convinced into, because, no, he’s driving, but, yes, salmon without white wine is like a suit with no coat. “It’s delicious. I didn’t know you could cook.”

Kaiba, with the tip of his knife, taps the ceramic bowl between them. “Eat more rice.”

The lights are on and the table is cleared, just about an hour later, or perhaps more, likely more, but the only thing he’s bothered to keep track of is Yuugi’s jacket, zipper tugged clean and left on the back of the couch where they’ve relocated themselves after some time; Yuugi’s arms are pale and thin, though he’d be dumb not to notice their recent curve of muscle, faint, subtle, unimpressive, yet existent all the same. Visible now when Kaiba flicks a finger at his short sleeve to pull it up over the shoulder and admire without shame. Yuugi looks at him, and he might’ve thought it strange were he not so deep into a world where laughter’s his favorite thing, and that’s what he does, laughs, and Kaiba keeps track of his jacket slung over the couch back as well as the number of wine glasses poured, five and seven, respectively, five and seven or fifty seven- no, no he thinks, shaking lightly his head. That’s too many. He’d had five, and he’s feeling them just a bit through the heat in the pit of his stomach and the ease to his tone, sitting there watching Yuugi finish off his seventh- eighth, drink, wine glass clinking dangerously back to the table whilst he wipes a wrist to his mouth.

“Okay, so,” he starts. They’re both bent over the coffee table, a wide piece of paper and pencil gifted to Yuugi to better explain himself. He’s always done better drawing out his grandiose thoughts than verbalizing them. The liter of Marsanne doesn’t aid that any. “So, it’s, like, a big circle, right? A big circle. Wha’s the circle except you can touch it? The- The _round_ circle-”

“Sphere,” Kaiba says, smirking only vaguely. “Idiot.”

“Right, right.” Pencil picked up, Yuugi writes the word down like a reminder note beside where he’d drawn the circle at the center of the page. More sketches, crude little Duel Monster characters fall beneath the point of the eraser next. “So, it’s a _sphere,_ and you put these pointer things on it, and, uh, they, like, make you win.”

“Make the needle markers digital,” Kaiba suggests, laying a heavy finger on the paper. “It’d sell better with holograms instead of physical pieces.”

“I don’t care about money,” scoffs Yuugi’s waved hand. His eyes close, brows raised high above them. “It’s about the _love,_ Kaiba. Love for the game.” Sight piercing open again, he nods once, determination flooding the branches of his face. “I’m thinking of calling it, um, _Globe Duel._ Or _Global Duel._ Whichever one markets better.”

Kaiba blinks at him. A snort works its way from his nose, cheek leaning to a lifted finger. “Call it... _Spherium.”_

“Spherium?”

“ _That’s_ what will sell.”

Wavering in his spot, Yuugi remains focused a quiet while, then coughs out a long string of laughter. “That’s the worst name I’ve ever heard!” All at once, he silences. “...I’m sorry. That was mean.”

“None taken,” Kaiba says, thinking back on it only once he’s finished, but he shakes his head once, either way. “Do you think _Duel Disk_ was the best name I could come up with? People want easy. They want stupid.”

Nodding several loose times, Yuugi rocks his hips along with his rolling thoughts. He stops only to nod again, higher, prouder. “I think it should be light. Not a big clunky board game. I want kids to bring it to their friends’ houses, keep it in their backpacks, ‘nd stuff.” Determined all over again, Yuugi bends to write another note, murmuring as he does, “ _Lightweight._ ”

“Like you,” mocks Kaiba, stands to steal the empty glasses off the table and make toward the kitchen with them. Something in him hurts to leave them unwashed on the counter, though he’s far more enthralled by Yuugi’s shouted, “I’m not _that_ light,” from the living room to wait to return.

“I mean,” Kaiba says as he pushes back through the door, places himself in the center of the room while Yuugi crouches behind the coffee table still, “ _you’re_ a _lightweight_. You’re hardly coherent off a few glasses of _wine.”_

“ _Okay_ , but _Kaiba_ , hear _me_ out,” Yuugi mimics, nails scratching the sides of his hair before he stands up, just barely wobbling yet steady enough to rise and walk over his way. “I weigh forty two kilograms.”

Another stripe of snorting, sardonic laughter. “I think I weighed that in the fourth grade.”

“I’m heavy! Pick me up, right now,” he insists. Both arms lift to clutch Kaiba by the shoulders. “Pick me up. I bet you can’t.”

If he wouldn’t, that’s the trigger phrase to move his grip on each of Yuugi’s sides, barely breathing with a lift of him right off his feet to rest on the incline of his chest. Kaiba steadies one step back, blinking a set of times to adjust his faintly stunted mind to the quick motion. Fine, good, easy, he stands in his place, bounces Yuugi in his hold a few times as he says, “See? I’m dense.” 

“It’s like holding a toddler.”

“A _dense_ toddler,” Yuugi argues, grinning, to which Kaiba shrugs halfway and administers, “You said it, not me.”

Yuugi laughs. His arms, thin and pale, wrap themselves around Kaiba’s shoulders as if to anchor him there, legs shifted up to fit his thighs in Kaiba’s either hand. Their stares meet with a short space sundering Yuugi’s goofy smile from his own tart stare. He doesn’t quite mind him getting comfortable there, a cat to its sunned window ledge, not until they’re the spotlight beneath the spectator sent in from the black beyond the front door.

Together, they pin wide eyes to the cough that blurts from Mokuba’s mouth, one poorly hidden for its smirking, its mumbling laugh among the words, “Uhh...whatcha guys up to?”

Immediately, Yuugi slides down to his feet, or he’s dropped, or Kaiba’s too gelid there to do anything at all but stare, another second reviving himself enough to watch Yuugi’s arms throw out beside him, proclaiming artfully, “Playing _Spherium.”_

Kaiba pulls the collar of his turtleneck to fix it from where it’d bunched.

“Uh, Spherium?” Mokuba asks, mouth upturned wryly. “What’s that? ‘Cause it looked like you were practicing figure skating, or something.”

“Mokuba,” Yuugi laughs, laughs, laughs, bending his knees as he prowls forward toward him, the sixteen year old he has to look _up_ at now, look up at to raise his palms and slap them to each side of his face, laying them there. Mokuba meets his madly wide stare. “Can you drive me home?” he slurs with another tiny husk of a chortle. “I think I’m a little drunk.”

Mokuba moves with the same annoyed brand of exasperation as he’d always been taught, pushing Yuugi away from him without ceremony. “Yeah, yeah. I’ll call Isono.”

Kaiba sees him to the door, and Kaiba sees to it that he calls him just as soon as the next sun rises.

“I’m fine,” Yuugi says when they meet on floor thirty one sometime after, sometime after he’d listened to the groaning on the other line to his condescended _good morning_ and had the call hung up right in his smirking face. Here on the PR floor, Yuugi’s dressed in a gray shirt and white slacks, no tie, but the slacks look new enough to make him wonder what store his mother bought them from. Kaiba had asked how he’s feeling if he can recall, and Yuugi said, “I’m fine,” laughed a little out of a cocktail of mortification and humor, says again, “No hangover, really. ...I did throw up last night though, but mostly because I was jumping on the couch for so long.”

“Spare me,” Kaiba rolls, hand lifted flat. 

Yuugi, humored again, tightens with his will. “Jounouchi was pretty annoyed with me when I got home… He hates drinking.” From there, Kaiba places the pieces together that he so far has, Jounouchi grousing on the couch of the shitty two bedroom apartment they share (he’d been told that earlier, sometime when Yuugi had been prompted to bring up his life as of late) whilst Yuugi stood beside him, animated and undisciplined to tell him all about the evening he’s had at Kaiba’s house. The splinter of envy, rage, he just knows hit Jounouchi’s stomach brings joy to flutter in his eyes, though it’s swiftly stolen to hear Yuugi, now, go on, “I only got him to stop being upset by promising I could, uh, ahaha...get him a job at KaibaCorp.”

He tightens his hands where they rest in a fold of arms. Rather than react with the slash of disgust he feels cut him up the stomach, Kaiba lifts his browline the same note as his shoulders. “Go ahead, recommend him to the hiring manager. I’m sure the CEO will approve that without question.”

“Really?”

“No.”

“ _Kaibaaa…”_ Yuugi moans, hands drawing down his face. They drop again only to fix him with the sweetest pout he’s capable of, eyes wide and angelic. “Please? I know you mentioned needing more people for the mailroom. Just give him a chance, and you can fire him if he messes up.”

“ _When,”_ Kaiba corrects, then cuts a scoff into the air. “What does he want with that, anyway? You expect me to believe he’s not too far up the ass end of his own pride to accept my pity?”

Blandly, Yuugi stares toward him. And shortly, he shrugs. “Money.”

Kaiba rolls his eyes so deeply he fears they’ll never return.

“Holy shit, free bagels?” 

Jounouchi works at KaibaCorp for thirteen seconds before Kaiba wishes to bludgeon him with a violent strike of his briefcase to the skull.

“Cream cheese, too. Jesus Christ, what is this, Hollywood?” They’d chosen a break room to meet as a group. At the counter set to the back, Jounouchi scavenges across the array of breakfast pastries, laid out complimentary each new morning for members of the Kaiba Corporation team. A fancy European _Keurig_ machine sits beside it. That’s how Yuugi called it, at least, when he’d told Kaiba with an impossibly wide grin his discovery that it makes hot chocolate, too. Kaiba asked him, then, what number mug that was in his hand, and Yuugi replied, then, with a touch of reluctance, three.

“Hey, are you even listening to me, Kaiba?”

When he blinks to _now,_ there’s a hand shaking in his face, and cream cheese smeared on Jounouchi’s upper lip. He licks it away before hollering again, his natural octave, “I been talking to you for, like, ten minutes. What’re you thinking about, spitting on kittens or something?”

He doesn’t grace him with a shake of his head. “Excuse me. I was fantasizing about watching rats eat your optic nerves out again.” Where Jounouchi cringes back in a cuff of anger, Kaiba merely pushes at him the folded fabric he’d been holding onto, gifts it off and frees his arms to cross over his chest. “Take your uniform. Mailroom is floor negative one.”

“Huh? Negative floors…uh, okay, I guess that’s- _hey!_ The hell’s this?!”

In his hands, Jounouchi holds the uniform out, a dark blue janitorial jumpsuit with short sleeves and an ironed collar, embroidered on the breast pocket to say _Ojousan._

“I must have input the name wrong,” Kaiba nonchalants. “Forgive me, young lady.”

“I am _not_ wearing this,” Jounouchi growls, throwing the coveralls back at their gifter, and Yuugi makes his presence known for the first time to intervene on his step forward, mouth frowning the slightest notch. “Jounouchi…”

Kaiba watches his gaze shift over to him, watches the glare melt back in breaths to the flame that is Yuugi’s pleading expression, the way he begs about _chances_ again without ever having a word bled. He knows it’s worked when he watches Jounouchi’s chest puff with an inhale, snatching the uniform back in one hand and another bagel from the counter with the other. His darkened eye aims at Kaiba. Slowly, he places it in his teeth, another taken from the counter, and another, quickly stealing a half dozen to balance in a stack against his chest, stepping forward to locate his new place of work.

In the break room on their own, Yuugi is shadowed by the sharp turn of Kaiba’s leer on him, shoulders pinching him smaller with fingertips tapping, smile sheeply and soft. 

Without any care to press the issue, Kaiba can only sigh and sweep toward the exit door.

Jounouchi works at KaibaCorp for thirteen days before he’s so close to defenestrating himself, that he decides it’s time to offer his calm and polite resignation on the boss’ desk. 

“Fuck this place,” is the first thing Kaiba hears that morning, just entering the main lobby where his stalker’s waiting to pounce. Jounouchi is five ten and Kaiba’s six two in his heels, so it isn’t quite the threat to be approached and have a finger shoved at his chest as he most likely presumes. A yapping Shih Tzu. He’d ought to have a little bow clipping up his bangs. 

“Fuck this place, fuck your stupid mailroom and everybody in it,” Jounouchi barks on. “Fuck your company. Fuck your mail. Fuck-”

“Hey, Ojousan, you okay today, pal?”

“Fuck _you!”_ he throws over one shoulder at the man a stretch behind them, coughing a mocking laugh as he carries on pushing the mail cart ahead of him toward the elevator. Kaiba notes mentally to learn his name someday. “But fuck _you,_ Kaiba, most of all. I get treated like shit all day around here, I got paper cuts up the ass, I’ve gotten so many stamps stuck in my hair I had to cut a goddamn chunk of it out-”

“Are you finished.”

Jounouchi blinks. His jaw sits in a hard bulge on either side. “Yes,” he grits, captures a breath enough to remain conscious there. Arms folded, Kaiba only stares at him. Stares so long he watches the fury fade away like hot spring steam. Again, he’s blinking, mouth twisting to murmur, “Aren’t you gonna fire me now?”

Lids low, Kaiba continues to stare.

“You want to collect unemployment insurance.”

A hand finds the back of his hair, eyes averting to a far chromatic wall. “I mean…”

“Hm.” His jaw tilts, and he smiles, a wide kind lover of the world right there in his lobby. “Well, Jounouchi, you’ve been such a model worker, I’d hate to lose you. I think you’re the best employee I’ve ever had. I couldn’t imagine this place without your expertis-”

“Fine, fine! I quit, get me the fuck out of here!”

His final explosion is a shed of the uniform from himself, buttons ripped open and shoulders slipped from. It pulls over his sneakers to be whipped onto the floor, and Jounouchi Katsuya, dressed in his white t shirt, boxers, and dignity, stomps through the revolving front doors of the KaibaCorp office building and out of sight.

From a corner, Kaiba catches the late witness walking forward. Yuugi stops when he spots him there. Both hands grip onto the handles of mugs.

“Where’s Jou?” he asks, head tilted in wonder. 

In the main lobby, Kaiba watches Yuugi’s gaze fall to the rumpled uniform thrown on the floor, lift again just to see him shrug.

Yuugi sighs.

Without another word, he pushes one mug forward, which is accepted, keeps the other and starts for the short line waiting around the elevator. Kaiba sips once. Hot chocolate.

In the coming weeks, Mutou Yuugi performs well enough at his job and wears dress shoes, even, one day, all in itself enough for Kaiba to invite him to his place another night; this time, he does not cook, though does buy champagne, Mokuba teasing over it to the point of being shooed right out of the house to spend the night at a friend’s as he’d already planned (“Oh, you need the house to yourself _aaall night?_ I get it-”). 

“Drain Shield,” hits his ears as the card flips over. The living room is warm, warmer still with the implemented rule on their third or fourth duel to tip back a shot for every time Life Points are lost. He watches Yuugi, cross legged on the floor on the other side to the coffee table, scratch a pen through his Points to add on 3000, Blue Eyes’ breathtaking attack negated. For now. Yuugi had insisted they keep it old school, casual, when Kaiba had first gone to strap them with Duel Disks and instead was forced to sit on his white velvet sofa, cards plain on the table without a hologram to be had. Across from him, Yuugi smiles in that little evil way of his when he knows he’s got the advantage. “Does that mean I _un_ drink?”

Kaiba keeps his frown stagnant in place. Lucky lucky fucking play. His hand of two cards lays flat. “Turn end. Let’s see what you can come up with to save yourself this time.”

Drawing off his deck’s top, he sees the way Yuugi smirks again behind the card he pulls, wastes no time to flip it onto the field’s back row. _Level Up!_ he reads along its top, hardly the time enough to do so from his upside down point of view before the card vanishes into Yuugi’s Graveyard alongside the tiny Silent Magician he’d been protecting the last few turns. 

“Hell’s that?” Kaiba grunts, a few more champagne shots in than he’d care to admit with his Life counter reading 1200. 

Yuugi’s quiet as he searches through his deck. A card pulls out into his two fingers, striking it high into the air. “Silent Magician, Level 8! Come forth!”

The card slaps face up into a Monster Zone. Kaiba stares at it, hardly blinking. “Without the holograms, you just look stupid.”

Unfazed, Yuugi shuffles his deck, setting it back in place before picking his hand up again. Kaiba isn’t bothered- Blue Eyes will suffer a moment, but he’s got more than enough ways to revive her from the Graveyard, and he’s got the Life Points to endure it in the meantime. He’s golden. It’s all coming together. 

“I equip Silent Magician with One Shot Wand,” Yuugi says casually, tossing the card down behind her. “ _Aaand_ I attack Blue Eyes White Dragon with 4300 Attack Points, which _means-_ ”

“Enemy Controller,” Kaiba announces, flipping the Spell over. Coming together, yes, it certainly is. He’d grin there, envisioning the Magician in the next turn with her pitiful 1000 Defense Points cowering for his Burst Stream, if only Yuugi would put that bastardly handsome one of his own away for two goddamn seconds.

“Silent Magician’s unaffected by her opponent’s Spell Cards,” Yuugi tells him. Chain round his neck jangling, Yuugi throws himself to his socked feet, points boldly forward and all but shouts, “I win, _Kaiba!_ ”

Like a shock were sent through him, his skin tingles all the way up his body, sitting there watching Yuugi, _Yuugi,_ staring at him as if he were a cloud of smoke- leaning forward, he grasps his flute of champagne, dumping the rest of it right into his mouth.

Kaiba looks up again, and Yuugi’s on his knees sliding his cards into a pile while his own remain untouched, eyes drawn down as he collects them all straightened using his chest as a place of balance. Wetting his lips, he stares at him, the living room dark and warm.

“You sounded just like him when you said that,” he comments, at last drawing up Yuugi’s gaze who, after a moment to absorb it, smiles tightly, nods just once.

They each take to cleaning up the cards without deciding whether they’re done, agreeing in silence they’d ought to take a break before the veins in Kaiba’s brain begin to leak. Yuugi pushes up to his feet, tapping his deck on the table with a satisfying thump as he does so. It slips into the case hooked on his belt while Kaiba’s stays on the coffee table, paper counting off five rounds of Life Points beside it, corners wrinkled. 

He does not protest when Yuugi takes a seat on the couch. They’re perched just ahead of a curtain drawn window, the one that lets the most light in in the daytime, turns screens unwatchable and his dark clothes sweating. Yuugi sits beside him, and Kaiba sits in his own space, perhaps very own moment in history, wherever that may be.

“Um,” brings him out enough to listen. A knuckle curls underneath Yuugi’s lip. He’s thinking, eyes pointed down, mouth puckered, until it all ceases, leaves him smiling there in a turn to him. “I’m excited for the convention next week. I’ve never done a, ah, _meet and greet_ before.”

“That’s why it’ll attract half the population.” Kaiba leans further back. Relax. Ease. “The first public fan-geared appearance of Mutou Yuugi. The convention center sold out of tickets two months ago.”

“Scary,” Yuugi murmurs. Kaiba scoffs. 

It’s what he scouted him for to begin with. The kind of publicity Yuugi attracts is when autumn hits and the orchards don’t know a moment of peace. A lowly little fuji tree in the far back that no one notices until it starts with those faultless crops, the one the farmer nurtures until he need not anymore, and the apples are still perfect even after the orchard passes on to his next of kin. Nobody cares about the tree unless the apples are perfect. That’s the point of the goddamn tree. 

He’d collected Yuugi for his army with just that in mind, that he’s the product and its placement all at once, a walking self advertisement that, when adhered to the Kaiba name, can only share the wealth. That’s the type of PR he needs. Together, they’re unstoppable, an impenetrable house of stone, even if Kaiba has provided the walls, roof, floor, windows, doors, and all Yuugi’s done is paint the mailbox and that’s all anybody ever comments on. _What a cool mailbox!_ Kaiba would like to shove his mail in it alright.

Yet...he finds himself, as he grows, differentiating between resentment that’s rightful and otherwise. Hating the man who collared his neck and tortured his adolescence day in and out, yes. Hating the man who painted his mailbox, when he’d only done it because he thought it’d be fun, and the attention only ever burns his face and bothers his day...mislabeled feelings. 

“I’m moving your position,” Kaiba says once he’s stewed in it long enough. Even in the dark, even without looking him straight on, the wonder in Yuugi’s stare is palpable. “You’ll continue doing appearances and modeling, but your employment under the PR team is terminated.” Like a pulse, his eyes flick to the side at him. “I want you on Tech Development, the branch for game creation and testing.”

Yuugi’s mouth is silent when it falls open into a gape. 

He isn’t shocked so long as he’s amazed, gawking, mesmerized, every emotion as blatant on his face as it ever has been, why Kaiba can tell when he’s got a Trap set, why nobody’s left guessing if his love’s as genuine as it always is. Yuugi tends to be an open book, yet no one thinks often to flip through the pages. 

“You’re serious?”

A nod hangs low as he sits up straight. “Nobody’s as passionate about games as you and I. That’s exactly what the current team is lacking. I want you to make something too amazing to be ignored. I want the next Duel Monsters.” At the back of his throat does it clear the finest bit. “...I want Spherium to be a reality.”

Speechless gratitude- _bigger,_ like he owes his very life, it simmers up around him, grin warbling onto his lips until it breaks out all at once, a burst of ebullience Yuugi hasn’t the outlet for beside throwing himself forward to wrap both arms around Kaiba’s chest.

First he’s still, because...he’s never been _held_ like that, can’t there think of a single person who’s hugged him that doesn’t share his blood. Kaiba hasn’t been touched in some time, for the factors being he doesn’t trust enough to think it sane, and no one thinks him sane enough to trust. But Yuugi touches him. Yuugi had brought him lunch. 

First he’s still and through the rest, too, all the way to being let go of, and Yuugi sits up beside him with a touch of remorse on his breath. “Sorry,” he tries to laugh. “I didn’t mean to be weird, I was just- just really excited-”

Kaiba more times in his life than he can count has had his hands complimented, their fanning beauty, kempt nailbeds, long precision, and he quite thinks it’s deserved, looking at his left one now when it lifts, middlemost finger catching Yuugi beneath the chin and all the rest fitting against his skin, until he’s looking at nothing but the dark of his closed eyes when there in the living room he has his first kiss.

He feels his throat throb the whole way through it, the endless five seconds of their lips just hardly daring to brush. Perhaps that hand shakes now, though it is still well past prepossessing even as it drops, even when it’s crawling up Yuugi’s back underneath his shirt, after they’ve pulled away and Yuugi offers an exhilarated, little laugh, _hah,_ and before either of them knew it were drawn back to the center with mouths clashing; Yuugi kisses him like a hungry dog, not the most pleasing of pictures though it’s just as raw and gnashing, lifting higher and higher on his knees and deeper and deeper against him until he’s straddling his lap, and there Kaiba’s hands go all over him, and with his eyes closed this way he can almost imagine Yuugi is taller and more noble, archaic a heart thrumming behind its cage, but- but there isn’t reason to, not when he’s so very conscious that it _is_ Yuugi, his arms are full of Yuugi and his mouth tastes like Yuugi, wanting nothing more than that, in his mind, having craved this so long and only just now, once he’s got it, realizing. 

They pull away kindly, sometime around feeling Yuugi grind into his lap, which he may or may not have dared to do three years ago, he never had the eye to know, but they do pull away and Yuugi does breathlessly stare at him like the world’s just ended somewhere. But Kaiba is calm, as much as he ever is (which, naturally, is null, but he’s calm enough now to keep his chest even, looking Yuugi in the eye with his chin lifted and hands tight).

“I want,” he begins, swallows, restarts in what sounds better to him, like a slow, sexy rinse of his voice against Yuugi’s clavicle where he moves to rest his cheek. “I want to fuck you.”

In his ear, a heartbeat slams. In his hair, delicate fingers run, released from it to glance up and just in time catch Yuugi nodding, and their evening moves itself, hand in hand, up the stairs.

Between his sheets, he has no worries, only cares to keep them both comfortable, perfect, divine, though outside them, when everything becomes normal again, he worries it won’t be.

The office the next day peddles quiet. Kaiba meets Yuugi at floor zero, the main lobby, and where his mind tells him he’ll be forced to fight him off and make clear nothing’s happened nothing’s changed, Yuugi behaves as he ever had before, and he’s wearing his black shirt and red tie combination again, this time with the white slacks. A little awkward, but he’s presentable, at least, when he enters inside and waves him hello.

Their conversation, if any, is sparse. Kaiba walks to the elevator. Yuugi follows. Rather than the thirty first floor, where he can imagine the sorrow of loss breaking throughout, the doors ding open on the eighteenth, glass separating the elevator entry from the noise of the room past it. 

He drops him off there, tells him go play, be good, and sets back for his own office at the top level.

Within three days, there’s a viable prototype.

Almost.

“So, it’s going to look like this,” says Yuugi, his fourth consecutive day coming into the office building. Kaiba had asked briefly how his grandfather was managing, though he brushed the issue off in saying Jounouchi wouldn’t mind covering another few days. “It’ll- It’ll _work,_ obviously, but this is what I want it to look like.”

In two hands, Yuugi presents what looks like a hardcover book, opens it up to a wide paper sphere fanned out from its center. On each player’s side, three divots are carved out where their needle markers should be. 

“I’m telling you,” murmurs from the corner of Kaiba’s mouth while he examines it, “holograms. This could all be virtual.”

It snaps shut before his nose.

“Maybe for the sequel,” Yuugi waves off, tucking the book under one arm. The eighteenth floor carries a constant ambiance that bleeds into the ears after so long of hearing it. Amazed shouts. Gasps. Buttons clicking and sound effects pewing. 

It’s another five days before he experiences the odd feeling of its absence. It is surely that, odd, and odd too how _whelmed_ he’d been by the week as to not think to visit the game creation sector again, not until the office is closed for the day and he’s on his way down, coat on, briefcase clutched. The doors open, and just as he’s been sure of anything else before, Yuugi is right where he expects, vest on the chair behind his back as he hunches forward over one short table.

“What are you doing here?” makes him jump. Kaiba leers down into the light of the desk lamp, despite the floursents on around them, where Yuugi’s current project sits beneath it. A portion of plastic, some kind of metal glinting on its underside. 

“Hi,” he says, grasping the plastic up before he turns to swing an elbow over the chair back, facing him as he explains, “I figured out that the inside of the sphere could be metal, and then the needle markers and Monster pieces are magnetic, so I’ve been tweaking with the design to allow the metal to still fold up, y’know, for easy travel. Lightweight. I think I finally got-”

“My office is closed, Yuugi.”

Like it were a revelation, that he’s just now noticed every screen in the room is off and not another soul breathes through the building, he blinks. “Oh.”

Kaiba watches him turn back around to set the model on the desk, scraping his chair to the floor in standing. The sphere folds neatly at first, though he must fight it with his hands the rest of the way. Annoyance ticks his face. Kaiba knows that look perfectly. The first Duel Disk had spun right off its rope thirty times before he could get it to stay.

“It could easily be as compact as a single card,” Kaiba says. “Equipped to project a sphere above it, you wouldn’t have to worry about any pieces being lost that way, either. It would be far more practi-”

“Not everything is better just because it’s technological!”

To the lift of his voice, to the way his hand falls with such a heavy clink of his bracelet to the desk under it, Kaiba stiffens his shoulders back, stands in silence. 

He watches Yuugi breathe there for a while. His hand lifts to his bangs, running through them brusquely, and when he turns around stray strands of blond still stand on their own. Kaiba could dip a brush beneath his eyes and write a scroll with it.

“I’m sorry,” Yuugi sighs, head shaking. “I’m really, _really_ sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you. I’m just... _stressed,_ and I haven’t really slept lately.” Again, he scratches the crest of his hair, exhales harshly another time with his jaw pointed toward him. “I’m sorry.”

Kaiba stares at him. Yuugi, after a moment of quiet, stares right back.

In a harsh pang, his briefcase drops to free him forward, a stride matched like a mirror until they both meet at the center, Yuugi throwing arms over his shoulders while Kaiba fits his tongue into his waiting mouth.

Yuugi’s back is up against the wall in the same minute. Kaiba presses him there, both hands on his thighs to hold him up while Yuugi grasps him by the face until his hands drop, blind on his top buttons to undo the first few and push his shirt off his shoulders. Their lips disconnect loudly. He allows Yuugi’s to roam on his throat only long enough to make him moan just once, tipping his head back up and demanding their mouths together again. 

It isn’t as shameless as he pictures it is to be buckling his pants back up in his VR beta testing room, though neither is it something he’ll dismiss away. Behind him, he can hear Yuugi smoothing his clothes and hair, a messy little cough into his fist the signal for Kaiba to turn back round again.

“I guess I should probably get home,” he thinks aloud. “And maybe work at the shop for tomorrow, instead of coming in. I’ll never leave if I come back.”

Kaiba allots him that much. “The convention is in two days. Don’t kill yourself with work before then.”

“Right,” Yuugi nods, too, eyes burning Kaiba’s back the whole length of his exit.

Friday, the first day of the weekend long gaming convention on the outer edge of Tokyo, goes along without a hitch. Kaiba had long since arranged a booth in the vendor hall to sell Duel Disk 3s, figures, cards, keychains, stickers, anything of value he could reasonably get away with slapping the KC logo on. He watches two teenaged boys walk past with KaibaCorp brand drinking cups. So far, success. 

There isn’t so much time as he might like to loiter. He’d only stepped through to ensure the vendor booth was set up as planned. And to send Mokuba on his giddy way through with a handful of banknotes shoved at him. But the sunglasses and lack of wide flaring trenchcoat won’t protect his identity for as long as he’d like. He moves past the set of doors, blinking in the light once the glasses pull off to hook inside his breast pocket. 

The panel room is vacant when they first arrive, though now filled with bundles of KaibaCorp branch executives, talking into headsets like mumbling men all sweating over the arrival of a first child. Kaiba cannot decide whether he’s meant to be the newborn here, he and his fussy hard to please self, or Yuugi, who he spots closer to the back of the room, five foot nothing and whiny at the mouth.

“What’s the problem?” Kaiba clips once he approaches closer. Yuugi isn’t _whining_ so much as he’s talking a mile a minute, bouncing on the heels of his feet up and down and up and down and up again while a _patient, patient_ woman does his face up in professionals’ makeup. 

Isono is beside Kaiba to quell the vexed curiosity at a moment’s notice. A faithful knight to the king that he is. “Mutou-sama is feeling a bit nervous.”

Kaiba tilts his jaw. There hasn’t been a moment in his life he could relate. Regardless, he walks close enough to Yuugi to capture his attention, silences his mouth though relentless on the fidgeting.

“Yuugi,” he says, drops his eyes along his jawline where the artist is just finishing up her contouring. Careful with his words, careful with ears that need not his privacy. “...You can do this.”

The words send several nods to his head, a thick breath in that holds within his puffed cheeks before releasing, one long, slow exhale. Before he’s the chance for another, the makeup artist sets to scrubbing a clear lash of gloss across his bottom lip, squinting up at the grooves of it. Yuugi muffles a short, “Thanks, Seto,” and that’s the end of it.

He doesn’t think anything of it until he and his team are poised behind an adjacent wall, watching the panel go on on several opposingly angled screens. It isn’t _his_ appearance. They’d have to pay better for that.

On the main screen he focuses in on Yuugi. They’d stationed him standing on the far left of the stage- though, hardly one at all, with its two steps to the top and three meter length. There’d originally been another influencer scheduled to share the room, some up and coming minor champion in the Duel Monsters world whose name Yuugi recognized and Kaiba didn’t, which was enough to pay off the convention center to move him to Saturday and leave Yuugi with full attention. And attention he _gets,_ if the roaring crowd of fans spilling all across the room is any indicator.

He watches Yuugi’s hands wring. Already, he bites at his own teeth. They’d practiced a hundred times not behaving nervously up there. Yuugi, at the very least, flashes a wide smile, all clean teeth and only slightly pained, headset in place on an ear for any cues or impromptu scripting. 

An announcer commands the room to gesture and rave. Twice the electricity throbs from the crowd. Two muscled men stand at the front half of the stage, another positioned by the side stairs, each placed by his cautious hand. Nothing can ever be too perfect.

With a namedrop, the crowd’s hollering their loudest, leaves the announcer nothing to do but wait with a smirk on his face for the noise to die out. Yuugi, in the meantime, waves a hand up high, smiling still. Even from the distance, Kaiba can see his fingers shake.

“For God’s sake,” he groans, pinching the bridge of his nose. He turns to Isono beside him, headset at the ready, refuses another glance at the dark circles beneath the arms of Yuugi’s gray shirt. “Tell him to stop lifting his arms.”

The way back from the convention center is dark and stifled. The back of the limousine, just the two of them after Mokuba had _insisted_ on taking the passenger seat up front behind the divider he’d snapped shut, radiates an air of sobriety.

He looks down to the screen in his lap. Thirty two thousand more views on the KaibaCorp site than the average day. Word of mouth’s an impressive mistress. 

Later on he’ll get to checking the stock and the range of Duel Links downloads. For now, he clicks his phone closed, pockets it, folds his hands on his folded knee to stare across the narrow aisle. Yuugi’s bent forward, forehead in palm. When he feels the stare burning into him, perhaps, is when he asks, “Was it as bad as it felt like it was?”

Answers toy in his mouth for a while. “Were I a fan of yours, no.” He licks at his top lip. “As someone watching from the unbiased sidelines, unbearably so.”

A cringe stretches over his face. Kaiba maps the expression out, rubs his mouth against itself dryly. “Just a tip, next time you accidentally spit on the microphone while you’re talking,” he says, “don’t tell the audience about it.”

Yuugi throws his face into his hands, a long strung groan spinning out from behind them. 

Night passes silent beyond them. They travel perhaps another half kilometer before Yuugi has the breath, and when he does, he speaks in a whisper Kaiba leans into, a defeated hush to replace his voice. “I probably disappointed thousands of people who’ve always known me as this hyper-confident, amazing dueling entity. I can’t do it.” He stares to the floor between both feet. Again he perches his forehead to a hand, this time keeping fingers curled in a way that covers his eyes as they start to glister with wet in the low light of the car. “I’ll never be _him_.”

Nothing can be expected of him. Kaiba could reassure the truth he’s spoken there, though doesn’t feel the situation craves it; beautiful hands unclick him from his seatbelt, moving on his knees along the bench seat to fiddle with the lock on the divider screen. When it does not budge right or left, Kaiba, satisfied, crouches back to take the seat just beside Yuugi and pull him against his chest.

It isn’t a wildly bold move, he thinks, could have done a dozen other things for better or worse but settles instead on an arm around him, just _miraculous_ to feel Yuugi’s body relax into him. His hand, though hesitant, decides upon running itself in slow drags up and down his back.

A while passes with just them, with just Kaiba’s gentle touches and Yuugi’s hand brought up to rest on his chest, right at its center. His head is heavy on his shoulder, a good kind of heavy, the way that tells him Yuugi has held onto nothing for the moment of just laying against him as they ride the road in silence, a long day behind them and a million more ahead. 

With the audacity at last conjured, Kaiba shifts his chin to rest among his hair and says, “...The pharaoh never had the balls to address me by my first name, so you’ve got some leverage there.”

“Hah-?” Too suddenly, he feels the hand at his chest clutch tightly then release again, Yuugi pulling back to offer him a flushed, abashed laugh. “Oh, ah, sorry. I didn’t even realize, I was so nervous, I was saying whatever came to mind-”

The limousine is another place he’s never kissed anyone, may have imagined it once or thrice, but no fantasy is ever as good as having this lifetime’s Mutou Yuugi up against his lips. It’s gentle, the way he holds him again, the way he’s held, sliding easily his tongue into the mouth on his and pulling from it a moan, more, tumbling softly out of Yuugi as they make out there in the backseat. He clutches onto Kaiba’s shirt again. There isn’t any pattern to where they stop, only one afterward, one of breaths caught after minutes of oxygen shortage. Yuugi settles back against him, and his head is heavy on his chest, heart thrumming just beneath.

Kaiba has the name _Spherium_ trademarked within a week. In another, the concept of an entirely spherical folding board game design is patented, and a stamped letter in the mail from Industrial Illusions approves the use of their characters in it. As if he needed it.

Folding the letter back into its envelope, Kaiba leaves it behind on his desk as he stands from it and strides for the elevator. Floor eighteen greets him the way it normally does. Amid a scathing one on one, one player pauses, blinks away the fire in his eyes and smiles brightly as Kaiba passes. “Good morning, Kaiba-sama!”

“Good morning!” his opponent chimes as well, bowing at her waist. 

His eyes fan to them each, recognizing the effort as much as he does that of the several others who stop and bow and mumble at him, feeling himself a bride finding her way through the aisle of gracious onlookers. At the very end, tinkering with a Rubik’s Cube, stands his groom. Proverbially. 

Yuugi glances up the way he always does at the sound of his approach. “Good morning,” he smiles, hands idle in their twisting. He nods his head somewhere left. “Uehara wanted to see how fast I could solve it. Forty eight seconds.”

“Impressive,” Kaiba murmurs.

Yuugi laughs. “Yeah, you have time to learn a lot of cool things when you grow up with no friends.”

He isn’t sure whether he finds it amusing or achingly veracious. Either way, the cube sets down on the table to be traded for the paper underneath the lamp. On this level, there are no defined spaces, more common law that everything be used when needed, though he notes the increase of Yuugi’s own personal trinkets accumulating on the far back table with the lamp that never sleeps. His eyes drag from mapping over a silver chain bracelet to looking where Yuugi gestures, the sheet of paper with sketch lines carded all across.

“I was playing Duel Links last night,” he says, as one does, keeping Kaiba’s attention on the paper, “And I was thinking about the Auto Duel feature. It seems to only think about what it has in its hand and nothing else in the deck.”

“It sucks,” Kaiba nods. “It’s more of an incentive to play it yourself.”

“Right,” Yuugi agrees. “Maybe, though, it could be better, more impressive, but give out less EXP than a regular duel. _That_ would be an incentive to play.” The page of the thoughts transcribed as pictures and illegible notes drops back to the table. “I was wondering, too, there’s that big arcade room at the Tokyo Kaiba Land. Do you have any Nintendo machines in there?”

“Plenty,” he answers back. So long goes without another word that it warrants his brow to lift. “What’s your idea?”

“Oh, nothing,” Yuugi looks up at him to say. “I just wanna go there and play sometime.”

Kaiba fixes him with a straightlaced look. Something tricks his brain into feeling he’s just seen a freshly new puppy.

“Hey, Yuugi!”

And there enters the mutt who’d sired it. 

Yuugi’s head turns just a bit too fast for his liking to the sound of Jounouchi’s voice, though more prominently he’d like to focus on the sneer to his mouth, the vast stance his legs shift into. “How in the hell did you get up here?”

Jounouchi wears a fine, fine layer of sweat under his hair as if he’d jogged here. “Still have my old key card,” he grins manically at Kaiba, and it shifts to something perfectly kind to turn to Yuugi and cup him by the shoulder. “Come with me, I have a surprise for you that’ll turn your piss green.”

“Huh? Jou, I’m working-”

“C’mon, c’mon, right over here.”

Two hands cover over his eyes from behind, Jounouchi steering him forward toward the front of the room. The only pleasure Kaiba derives is overhearing to one side a worker mumble, “Isn’t that Jounouchi Katsuya?” and another respond back, “I think his name is Ojousan, actually.”

But the smugness is short lived. Where the floor divides at a plate glass wall, the sound barrier to the other side of it where the elevator drops off, he watches Yuugi be stopped, hands still shielding his sight from the second side of the glass from which, to his disgusted chagrin, another emerges. 

Jounouchi lifts his hands. He can only imagine it’d be much more climactic watching from Yuugi’s perspective, to blink his eyes back into focus only for them to land on his long lost best friend on the other side of the glass. Kaiba watches her hand lift up in an innocent little wave. Reflected in the glass, he notes the stupefaction on his face. 

“Anzu!” 

Between them, the door pulls open and she’s in his arms in a second. Kaiba shifts his weight to the front foot.

“What are you doing here?” he breathes, pulled back to grasp her at each bicep. 

In a laugh, one that pinches her nose up, she answers, “I’m here to see you, dummy.”

“Well,” he breaks off to chitter his excitement into energy, “Well, yeah, here at the office, but I mean in Japan, what’re you doing back here?”

The pair of them sunder if only to walk for the back of the room again. Jounouchi follows behind them, grinning. “I saw your press conference on TV a few weeks ago,” Anzu tells him. “It made me remember how much I miss seeing you, so I started planning a trip home.”

Today, Yuugi is wearing black. Anzu wears white shorts and a blue summer blouse patterned in flowers. She’s made no changes to her hair in the past six months. So much for Manhattan fashion.

A meter from him now, Yuugi pulls his mouth into a hot line. “Th- They aired that all the way in America..?”

“Of course. It was a _huge_ deal over there.” Anzu, noting his disinclination, matches it with a tight smile. “I only heard good things afterward.”

“Yeah, and I only heard _one_ person call you Mutou Pitstain,” Jounouchi reassures, hand on his shoulder. 

Kaiba sees in slow motion the roll backward of his eyes, the smack of both hands sliding down his face. Over his head, he sees her elbow stab into Jounouchi’s ribs like a knife in an alleyway, doubling over in his place while she and Yuugi move ahead. “So, Jounouchi tells me you work here now? How did that happen? Did Kaiba finally stop being a huge- oh, hi, Kaiba.”

His eyes fall lowly to her. “...Mazaki.”

They wait in a wash of silence for nothing certain. A scuffing of sneakers on wood hits toward them after a minute. Jounouchi huffs a hard breath, first as if taking in the smell of the room. “My old stomping grounds… Hey, Anzu, you know Kaiba called me the best employee he’s ever had?”

The cheeky grin on his face just begs to be slapped off. Without the chance, Anzu steps in to take care of it for him. “Was that before or after you were breathing in mail truck fumes for two weeks straight?”

Perhaps he could hate her the least. 

Tightening up, Jounouchi moves to grasp her in a lock of his arm around her neck. “Very, very funny. Are you sure you’re a dancer? ‘Cause you’d make a great comedian- _HG!”_

Her palm on his face pushes him off in a sweep, stumbling back until he’s steps from her to catch himself. He licks in another harsh breath. “You know, you wouldn’t be laughing if you coulda just seen me five minutes ago, when that chick over there _begged_ me to autograph her Duel Disk.”

“So you gladly vandalized company property,” Kaiba sniffs. “I’ll have the bill sent to your address.”

“ _HAH?_ C-Come on, now, how could I disappoint a woman like that? I-”

“It’d be no different than the countless other times.”

Step falling forward, he points forward a strict finger gun. “Yeah, sure, _Kaiba,_ I’ll have you know I can last over an hour in bed. I’m like a racing greyhound. Nothing but muscle.”

“Wow, Jounouchi,” Anzu snurks. “Save some girls for the rest of us, would you?”

Had he a fuse, it’d have been lit the very second he walked in and caught Kaiba Seto’s stare, reaching its very peak now as he, wildly, leans forward to see Yuugi concealing pathetically his itch of laughter.

“Oh, yeah, I bet you find that _real_ funny, Yuugi,” he says. “Bet it wouldn’t be if you could’ve seen the boobs on that lady! But you’re too busy thinking about your _dreeeam maaan-”_

“Jounouchi-”

“Coming home wasted, jumping all over the couch talking about what a big crush you have, _oh, Jou, he’s perfect, he’s-”_

“Okay, okay-”

“ _He cooked me dinner! He-”_

“Jounouchi, _please_ shut the fuck up!”

Blinking silence. It hardly takes long before Jounouchi’s coughing a cackle into his hand. 

“Okay, now _that’s_ funny,” he allows. “You never yell at me, makes me know I deserved that one. Hey, show Anzu that game you’ve been working on lately.”

Two things Kaiba notices are the quick way they fade back into normalcy to turn for the table, and Yuugi’s refusal to meet his eye.

“Kaiba-sama!” 

Hardly out of his personal space, he blinks down toward the beg of his attention, a girl no older than Mokuba dressed up in low ponytails, bleach blonde. “Excuse me for bothering you! I’m Watanabe Yuko, here on my high school’s internship program! Could you take a look at this Duel Disk I’m using? I think the card reader is off.”

Vaguely, he flicks his focus behind him a moment. The Spherium prototype sits folded open under the lamplight. Anzu nods along to every explained detail.

He’s straight on his turn back, reaches without word to take the Disk from her. A reminder ticks in his brain to report the fresh twenty year old to the police when he spots _JOUNOUCHI KATSUYA!!✰_ markered on the side.

The Disk fits on his arm with a flourish. Eyes hardly open, he lifts his arm to inspect the panel on the very bottom. The intern watches him as if he’s the hunky soap opera surgeon performing his first open-heart. 

“Sooo…” nudges his ears from a length behind him, sometime in between examining the inner tech of the Disk and having been left to do so, “Who’s this Mr. Dream Man Jounouchi was talking about?”

Kaiba stiffens. It’s an odd sensation, the run of invisible fingertips up his spine, chest throbbing in the anticipation to hear what he knows to be true. _Knows,_ yet, it’s- that’s where it becomes odd, the barrier between apples and branches. The fragile, fragile little stem.

“I’ll...tell you later,” he hears a weak voice reply. 

Anzu’s hits back after it, “Come _on,_ Yuugi! I flew fourteen hours to see you and you won’t even give me a hint?”

“It’s just _someone_ -”

“ _I’ll_ give you a hint-”

“Jounouchi, don’t-”

Quiet, as quiet as floor eighteen can be with thirty patrons jaunting around inside it. The intern watches him click the panel closed, shift his arm to mid height. 

Quiet. Then, in an incredulous whisper, _“No way! Him? Him?!”_

From his pocket he slips the first card off the top of his deck. Smoothly, it’s tossed, and the intern balks back in amazement alongside a half dozen others to the materialization of Blood Vorse slashing his swords right before their eyes.

“There’s nothing wrong with it,” Kaiba dismisses, pulling the Duel Disk off to return to her. He waits not for her response, striding out of the room one foot ahead of the other in practiced fluidity. 

Saturday means naturally that there is no school in session, thus gifting Mokuba with the free time to cling around his brother as long as he likes.

“You really don’t think it’s a good idea?” 

Top floor office. Sun beating his back. Fingers on the keyboard. Everything he likes. 

Mokuba, laying with legs swinging off the sofa arm, chews thoughtfully a mouthful of cereal bar. Caring not for the lack of reply, he goes on, “I think it would give me more perspective. The fancy private school is nice, but public school would let me meet a lot more people, and-”

“For the last time,” Kaiba murmurs, not in annoyance but plain authority. He clicks his mouse at several email chains. “I’m not transferring you for your last year of high school. And I’m absolutely not transferring you to Domino.”

“But it’s where you and Yuugi went-”

“And it was pitiful then, I can only imagine how much it’s deteriorated since.” 

“But they have this really cool program now, because it’s where you graduated, if you go there you can intern at KaibaCorp for a semester.”

Confusion lifts his lip into a sneer, glancing away from the computer only long enough to fire it at him. “I never signed off on that.”

“I know,” Mokuba says. “The Employment Team asked for my permission. But! _But,”_ he starts, pushing himself to sit up straight as his brother’s gaze burns upon him. “I knew you’d agree to it, because it’s such a good opportunity for underprivileged kids. I talked to one of the girls in the program, she said it’s the best experience she’s ever had.” Kaiba watches there, the pinch of heat to Mokuba’s face that he covers with a palm to the cheek, but he’s smiling like a dream as he palavers, “Her name’s Yuko, she’s really nice, and she loves working with tech stuff, and playing Duel Monsters, and she’s- she’s really pretty, and-”

“I’m not transferring you to Domino High so you can spend more time with a woman.” Sixty four useless emails collect into the trash folder. “Go check in with the Event Coordinators about the Vocaloid collaboration.”

“ _Fiiine,”_ Mokuba groans, dragging himself up to stand. The wrapper in his hand crinkles, glancing to it before holding it up. “Want the rest of this?”

Kaiba hardly looks away from the screen. Fingers flying over the keys, he offers null but an opened, waiting mouth. The cereal bar fits into his teeth. Mokuba brushes from the room with a promise to see him later.

When he does, it’s no later than he’s usually home, and he fits inside with a loss of his coat and a lift of his phone that, from its top missed calls, reminds him entirely that he’s not yet done performing as a human for the day.

“This is... _amazing,”_ is the first thing Yuugi has to say of seeing his basement for the first time. He’d like to tell him it’s nothing in comparison to the one at the office, floor negative three right underneath the mailroom and the private sanctuary they’d held their photography session in. KaibaCorp’s basement is an utter paradise lined in chrome. Limitless possibilities. The highest quality tech in the world. But he doesn’t say that. He sniffs, instead, leading him through the darkened square of gaming chairs and their screens, more consoles than he could ever possibly play on his own, tri-monitor computer setups for MMORPGs or the occasional test of his own creations. Yuugi mentions something offhand about escapism. Kaiba shrugs one shoulder. 

Inside, he simmers with that pride of admirability all over again.

“We should probably, um,” Yuugi begins, placing on a table corner the stacks of paper he’d brought. He asked a week ago if they could go over the draft of the Spherium rulebook together, just to get some outside input, to which Kaiba agreed, said they’ll run it through the scanner in his basement and compare it with other documents of game rules, look for clarity, cohesiveness, potential copyright. Now, his vision lurks over his shoulder. “...get started on this, is that DDR?”

Kaiba meets his focus, a two player machine poised in the corner. A gift for Mokuba’s first dentist appointment he’d gone into on his own. He sniffs.

“So, I was thinking,” leaves Yuugi’s mouth in a pant, shouted over the music and demanding a pause for breath. The song’s halfway through by the time Kaiba pushes up his sleeves. Neither stare leaves the screen ahead. “The rules will be pretty straightforward. The goal is to win, but it’s more important to have fun. To strategize, be a team with you and your Monsters.”

Kaiba hits his foot to the up and right arrow in perfect timing. 

Yuugi rolls through several dry breaths before he can continue, “I want it to be easy enough for kids to understand, but to still keep the attention of older players. Do you think Mokuba could look them over, too?”

“What?”

“I said,” shouts louder over the beat, feet thrumming rapidly against the arrow pads, “do you think _Mokuba_ can help us look the rules over?”

“I thought you said, ‘I’m a _loser’,_ ” Kaiba calls back. He lands a faultless final time right as he’s instructed. Yuugi, with a laugh, stands beside him in the same pose, breathing heavy through the nose. 

Scores roll on the screen. Kaiba smiles darkly.

“Awesome,” Yuugi congratulates, beaming at the proclamation of Kaiba as the round’s winner, which for no reason feels nowhere close to as good as Kaiba knows it should. Shoulders heaving, Yuugi swallows, turning in a grip for the metal bar behind him. Before he says a word, Kaiba can read the look on his face, the thirst in the eyes trained toward his favorite console against the other wall. “...Do you have Majora’s Mask?”

Hesitation isn’t a color he knows. Where he fits pristinely into the curve of the black backed chair, its lush red interior, the one beside it leaves enough room for Yuugi to pull his legs up into a criss cross, controller in the lap and focus on the screen. He’d let him flirt through the collection of cartridges as long as he liked, finally lifting one with a knowing smirk, blowing a stripe of air inside before pressing it into the reader of the N64. Kaiba doesn’t flinch at the opening title. Smash Brothers is nothing he can’t handle, no, waiting until Yuugi’s silhouette passes by the TV and crawls up into the chair beside him to press start. 

“How was work today?” Yuugi asks him, rolling his joystick through the stage selection. Player 1 privilege. 

Expression unimpressed, Kaiba watches the screen, licking across his lips idly. He’d hardly noticed Yuugi hadn’t come in today. Hardly, of course, means constantly, throbbingly. “More stressful than I needed it to be.”

“Sorry,” he pouts. Buttons flick under his fingerprints. “You could have cancelled, I would’ve been fine coming over another night.”

Kaiba does not bother to correct his usage of cancelled to postponed. Little things. Growth. On the castle platform, Fox McCloud kicks Link bluntly in the face. Kaiba glares.

“I had a long day, too,” he goes on without prompting. “Anzu wanted to go out for breakfast, and while we were there, Jounouchi called from Burger World to tell us he made us milkshakes already, but Anzu didn’t want to see her old boss, it was a whole thing. They gave Jou his job back, by the way.”

He definitely cares. Link slashes his sword down hard rapid consecutive times. 

“And then we went to see Anzu’s parents. Oh, and we went to the store. Anzu needed Ibuprofen. She said sleeping on the couch for a week would destroy her back otherwise. No matter how many times I tried to give her my bed, she wouldn’t take it. We ended up wrestling on the floor over it.” Fox lasers Link off the edge of the roof. “It was funny, though.” Another kick to the face. “She won.”

“She’s staying with you,” Kaiba says more than asks. Conscience tucked to bed, the controller is squeezed tighter in his hands.

“Mhm, of course,” Yuugi hums. “She wanted to stay at her parents’ house, but they’re in the middle of repainting her old room, and it’s better, anyway. We get to see her more before she leaves again.”

He does not look to catch the expression he wears. 

“Then,” Kaiba grits out, A button mashing, “why come here while she’s waiting at your house?”

“‘Cause...we had plans,” Yuugi shrugs. “You’re my friend, too.”

This time, he _does_ look, looks right at Yuugi and who he thinks he is, the profile of his face with soft bangs down the side and the faintest bit of squish under the chin, youthful, _Yuugi_ -like. The darkest moments of Kaiba’s blinks swear to him it’s someone else sitting there, dressing him up in short bursts of gazing, opacity of robes and gold and an age old face. Something more familiar than Yuugi, if ever that’s possible. It could matter to him, but he feels the way it doesn’t is why he can’t stop his staring, the way he blinks and blinks just to catch it at first, then lays his eyes open clear and wide to look at _Yuugi,_ Yuugi sitting beside him in his basement, Yuugi wearing jeans with the knees ripped and a faded MCR shirt, Yuugi smelling of laundry soap when they stand close enough, Yuugi. Yuugi. Yuugi.

“...Kaiba?” 

Reanimated, he looks at Yuugi rather than through him now, recalls what it feels like to breathe. Across the TV bottom blares _FOX WINS_ with Link clapping reluctantly behind him.

“Did your controller come unplugged…” Yuugi glances to the cord, stiff in its place, then back to Kaiba at his right side, concern tight on his face. “Are you okay?”

Recalls what it feels like to breathe, does so with a burn all the way through his lungs.

“I’m fine,” Kaiba replies, and throws himself back into the game. Yuugi’s tentative, though he, too, rejoins the action to select the next round of characters.

By match fifteen or so, the pitch dark of the room outside the TV screen and the various blinking lights of computers and gadgets hurts his eyes to blink, but he can proudly say Yuugi’s had to clap for _him_ at least six times, balancing back out the ire in his gut to any round lost. He’d won twice in a row once. Yuugi never makes him feel it’s not deserved. 

When he marks his seventh victory, Yuugi plays the dramatic, falls over at the waist just as Fox had fallen off the platform ledge, bent there in the chair with his legs out straight and his hair brushing Kaiba’s outer thigh. The controller stays in his hands. He mewls a long note of despair. “You’re amazing, you’re amazing, I just can’t take it anymore!”

Yuugi faces the ceiling. Kaiba faces down to look at him. Shadow looming across his eyes, he sees Yuugi begin to stutter a laugh, quiet enough to only smirk as he half lays there in his own faux bout of misery. He doesn’t stop himself from rolling a little grin onto his own mouth, and Yuugi doesn’t stop _him_ when, upside down, he leans to connect their lips. 

There isn’t anything to do, when light pours suddenly in from the top of the stairs, but each jerk their heads to their own lefts, sets of eyes wide and curious to the sound from the staircase edge.

“Hey, are you guys ever gonna come up for air?” Backlit from the hallway entry, Mokuba stands as a visible outline, face stern, bangs clipped in a dose of barrettes like a decora girl. Houseclothes of a shirt and socks and boxers, Kaiba can only guess he’s been studying. “It’s ten:forty five, yaknow.”

The surprise in his throat translates in real time to Yuugi sitting up, stark, blinking a hundred times over. “It’s _that_ late? When- How did-” His head shakes, fanning an evened breath. “We didn’t even do anything _productive_.”

“I kicked your ass at DDR,” Kaiba says, shrugs handsomely. “I’d call that very productive.”

“Aw, you guys played DDR without me?” Mokuba calls down the stairs.

Smiling, amused, Yuugi sets his controller down once Kaiba moves to shut the system off, following him past the chairs and up the staircase. At the midst, he lays a hand to his stomach. “I should’ve realized so much time had passed, I’m _starving.”_

“Stay for dinner,” the elder Kaiba offers once they reach the first floor again.

“You could spend the night, too,” then says the younger. “There’s a ton of extra rooms upstairs. Then you guys could go into work together tomorrow.”

Beneath their identical stares, Yuugi holds onto his nape, expression written with the uncertainty of how to decline.

“At least stay for dinner,” comes Kaiba’s final declaration. Yuugi, though, only waves his hands. 

“It’s okay. I have leftovers from the breakfast place we went to.” An ant beneath glass, he writhes hotly under their waiting eyes, pulling at the front of his shirt to fan it away from himself. “...Good omurice.” 

Exchanging glances with his brother, Mokuba shrugs. “Suit yourself. I already ate, so I’m gonna go up to bed. See you later, Yuugi, ‘night, Seto.”

Waves part him away. Yuugi clutches his own wrist, mouth massaging against itself. 

He stands almost the same way on the front porch step, not quite as timid yet twice as shy, if Kaiba can be so poetic, leant in the front door frame while Yuugi stands just ahead of him in the arms of the cool, rich night. If he were a farmer, he’d like to spend some time just looking at his favorite tree, but he wouldn’t tell it it were his favorite out of fear the fruit won’t taste the same, or that the other trees might not think it right, but the other trees are just that, _others,_ others that have their thoughts and minds and very own apples to worry about; if Kaiba were a farmer, he’d stand in his orchard at dusk wondering how to tell his tree goodnight, which shouldn’t even be a wonder at all, just say it, say goodnight, he won’t go anywhere, he’s a tree- it’s a tree. It’s a tree with roots in Kaiba’s soil, that’s right. He need not worry about losing his tree. Not that he does. It’s just a tree. 

“...Goodnight,” he breathes at last, a murmured husk, a pouring of his eyes down on him. “Drive carefully.”

Yuugi nods, and normally, a normal person would normally leave when told goodnight, but his roots remain firm on the front porch step. 

“I’ll see you at work tomorrow,” Yuugi says like he’s not even listening to himself, and Kaiba says, “You will,” and stays standing there the same.

“Um,” licks at his lip. “Maybe we could... _talk_ , sometime.”

Trees don’t talk. They don’t say a word. Kaiba raises his expression to bored interest (a look he’s perfected through _practice,_ he’d say). “Pertaining to what?”

He could be easier on him, considering the way he can just tell Yuugi has been mulling this conversation over in his head for days, weeks, likely, and that now as it leaves him he’s roasting every last bit of energy right down to the ends. He could be easier on him. Instead, he watches, the cat, the farmer, the God.

“I just, I was just thinking, maybe…” Yuugi starts, lip bitten raw on the bottom. A breath fogs the cooled night air just around his mouth. “Maybe we could...talk about...stuff. Like about, _y’know…_ uh.”

Yuugi may have tried harder to follow it up or patch the ground beneath his feet, but Kaiba decides he owes him not the chance, raises instead one hand from his side to grasp within it Yuugi’s fingers and massage them gently in his own.

“Yes,” Kaiba whispers against the dark. “We can talk.”

They’re still a moment, until Yuugi nods, smiling with his top teeth, retracts his hand to scratch his jawline with it. “Okay...cool. Goodnight, Kaiba.”

Eyes flick up and down him just once. “...Seto.”

Wider goes his smile, warmer the skin it moves. “Goodnight, Seto.”

Normally, two normal people and their normal lives would part normally at a goodnight.

Instead, Yuugi lingers, and Kaiba loiters, both at the cusp of his front door, at the cusp of its marble perfection and ornate mahogany wood. That’s the door, perfect, and his hands are perfect and he wouldn’t pick a tree if it didn’t have the most perfect goddamn fruit imaginable, most perfect taste of the lips when Yuugi leans up to kiss him, just once, just subtly. He feels the smile as it presses against him, when just once becomes just twice, three times, all fleeting little presses of lips that move against each other, perfectly.

“I _knew_ it! I totally called that, like, months ago.”

A mirror of a time so recent. He and Yuugi at once are aiming their eyes inside the house, deep up toward the middle of the staircase where Mokuba waits, one hand on the railing and triumph on his face.

Yuugi burns same as the starlight overhead, but he’s sniffing a bunch of tiny laughs, bids one last goodnight and, normally, goes down the walkway to find his car. The door shuts after him.

Kaiba wastes no time in stalking toward the stairs inside, the faint heat of his face held low. “Mokuba… Get to bed.”

“Uh huh,” he says with a thin smirk. “I’ll get to bed, I think you should, too. Afterall, you had such a busy day of _kissiiing Yuuugiii-”_

He silences at the first press of Kaiba’s foot to the bottom step, gearing his body up to flee at the sign of his older brother pouncing toward him up the stairs, through the hall, laughing terribly the whole way.

Despite the advice, Kaiba declines sleep the remaining night left afterward.

Not that he hasn’t the choice. He could definitely sleep if he tried. He could certainly. Be rid of all the thoughts circling his head like a stratus stripe, yes, that’s what he could have done had he wished it. Crouched over in his home office, lamp light in his eyes. With every trip to the basement and back he’s precise to make not a creak. He doesn’t have to be up at- a check of the wrist, _three:twenty nine AM -_ thinking of Yuugi, it’s that he wants t- ...no, that isn’t quite right. It’s the point where the tides of night and morning meet, the point of time where he starts losing arguments with himself. His shoulders fill with a scoff.

_What are you waiting for?_ The question that lingers most, what is he waiting for, really, think deeply on it. What is he waiting for? Why is he waiting? 

_Why?_

Why wait, because the best apples grow in the fall. Because there’s things he has to do first. Because there’d be publicity he doesn’t care to handle. Because he isn’t sure of himself. Because he’s never been so sure.

The next morning is a Sunday in the early throngs of March. Yuugi is wearing black and white again. 

“I finally convinced Anzu to take my bed,” he eeks out as they stand together on the eighteenth floor, rubbing a hand to the lower knot of his back. 

Kaiba hadn’t been down there for more than a minute before, and among the thrown greetings of his employees, Yuugi had spotted him with a smile, taken no initiative to say anything of value until Kaiba asked what he was slouched over like that for. More than usual. Palms pressing his back, he pushes it in a painful stretch, if the squint of his eye is any indication, relaxing all over again in an exhale. He points, then, at the box underneath Kaiba’s arm. 

“Demo I worked on last night,” he answers gruffly, shoving the box into Yuugi’s arms. Inside, lid pulled back, a VR headset and hand sensors are lifted out. 

Yuugi shoots him a curious look, though smiles well enough and places the headset over his eyes while Kaiba presses various buttons on the side. With care, he places the sensors in his palms. Yuugi grips them slowly. 

“Whoa,” he says upon immediate startup. Kaiba stands with a hand at his own cheek, other arm folded and legs set broad. “You did this all in one night?”

“It isn’t long,” Kaiba tells him, though he’s enthralled in prattling on, “It looks like an otome game. ...Is that _you?_ Ha.”

He swallows. The finger on his cheek begins to tap.

What he can see of Yuugi’s face changes irrationally with his every movement. He laughs one moment, pointing out something cute in the scenery or dialogue, makes a comment on the structure when he likes it, then all at once stands there, lost in another world in the middle of the room, mouth a long line of silence. Kaiba watches his hands move out with their sensors, finger tapping at what he cannot see. 

There isn’t anything said when he frees himself from the headset, hair bothered as he blinks in the light. When his focus settles, it does so on Kaiba, still in his same closed pose, still waiting.

“Like I said,” he murmurs, “just a demo. I’d appreciate your feedback nonetheless.”

Ambiance. Gameplay and hardship. The lamp is on on the back table, and the sides of his shoes are unscuffed. Like clockwork, or like perfection, Yuugi places the VR equipment back into the box, and moves to walk past him without a word.

Kaiba blinks. No, he’s never doubted himself, never felt nervous, never been hurt, never been wrong. There isn’t that knot right where he breathes, not again, not a rush of feelings he knows nothing of or how to call but anger. Maybe he’s angry, watching Yuugi walk right by him after all he’d done to make those eighty four seconds the most perfect of his life. Maybe he’s angry, and maybe it’s all pinched out the second Yuugi turns over his shoulder, beckoning with one hand that he follow his path.

Kaiba blinks.

They, as a pair, reconcile in the elevator, doors closing them off to the world just as Yuugi’s telling him, “I didn’t want to say anything with so many people around.”

Beside him, he watches Yuugi lift a finger, pressing it to the top floor call button til it lights up golden. They begin to float upward. Quick as he may, Yuugi’s moving at him, reaching up to grasp his jacket collar, pulling their mouths together into one fine, gnawing machine.

“Yes,” Yuugi says within the first half minute, gasping himself off just to say, “Yes, by the way.”

Staring into his eyes, the ones he’s known perhaps a hundred lifetimes, Kaiba leans downward, and kisses his lover right back.


End file.
